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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 10 Hansard (3 September) . . Page.. 2965 ..

MRS CARNELL (continuing):

I am sure that everybody in this Assembly will join with me in thanking the staff for the wonderful job that they do in our Emergency Department. I present the following paper:

Canberra Hospital Emergency Department - ministerial statement, 3 September 1996.

I move:

That the Assembly takes note of the paper.

MR BERRY (3.57): Mr Speaker, no doubt emergency departments, and in particular the Emergency Department at Canberra Hospital, still well known as "Woden Valley Hospital" - the expensively renamed "Canberra Hospital" - fulfil an important role for the community. I know from my own experience that they are a bunch of dedicated people and that it is a pressure department.

Mrs Carnell: Then why do you bag them all the time?

MR BERRY: Mrs Carnell interjects, "Why do you bag them all the time?". I do not bag the staff. Mrs Carnell knows whom I bag. It is the Liberal Government and its philosophies in relation to health that get it from me.

Mr Speaker, the people from the Emergency Department are often the first contact with emergencies. They have a very difficult job, and it is one which they are to be congratulated for performing. A good emergency department is underpinned by a good hospital system - that is where the problems start to arise - and a good community care system as well. Who can forget the recent report, the one that we heard about - who knows what we did not hear about? - which described the hospital as being on emergency bypass? It could not receive emergency patients and it had to refer people to hospitals as far away as Wagga.

Mrs Carnell: No. We took all emergency patients from within the ACT.

MR BERRY: Mr Speaker, Mrs Carnell interjects, "We took all the emergency patients from the ACT". So, other emergency patients, who would normally expect to come to this hospital, would have been diverted to hospitals miles and miles away and their lives could have been put at risk. That was because the hospital was on emergency bypass and could not take emergency patients. Do you know why it was on emergency bypass, Mr Speaker? I heard from a rattled staff member who explained the situation to me. This was before we pulled the information out of Mrs Carnell, like pulling a tooth. Mrs Carnell does not volunteer these sorts of things; you have to get the information out of the bag of secrets.

This rattled staff member described the situation in terms like this: "ICU and CCU" - that is, the intensive care unit and the cardiology care unit - "are full. There is somebody with chest pains on a trolley down there under observation in the Emergency Department, and Mrs Carnell seems interested only in dealing with elective surgery waiting lists. She has lost interest in the emergency side of it". That was the position that was put to me.

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